What is PowerPoint?
Powerpoint presentations are excellent for teaching large ESL classes of students. Powerpoint helps concentration and guarantees effective learning if everything goes according to plan.PowerPoint is a software bundled in MS office and used for creating presentations usually in the form of slideshows. Over the years Microsoft has been updating the software, each time making it even better. Your computer might already have PowerPoint installed.

Why use PowerPoint presentations in ESL Classrooms?

My experience

Teaching English or any other language especially to large classes of kindergarten, primary schools and absolute beginner students can prove to be a nightmare at times. As a teacher of large classes especially, I found the use of PowerPoint presentations a great aid in my teaching (by large classes I mean classes of 40-80 students). In China where I teach, large classes are not uncommon.)
So how do you teach a class of 50-60 students staring at you, hungry for knowledge?
Luckily, most classrooms in China are well equipped with overhead projectors and in some cases they have school computer networks and classrooms P.A Systems.
Being a novice in using the computer, I always did not know how to get started. However, when I eventually began using MS PowerPoint to create classroom presentations, I soon realized the similarities it shares with MS word, which I was vaguely familiar with at the time. In a few weeks of using PowerPoint presentations, I was amazed by the results. All of a sudden my students could concentrate long enough for me to drive home new language points. With new language points well into their brains, classroom games followed with ease. This was when I understood why some of my brilliant games had failed in the past.
At the end of the semester, my class of 50 students all passed their English exams, with 10 students scoring 100% in the final test and the least score being a 66% pass. Note that test papers of final exams in most schools in China are usually corrected by a teacher who does not know the students. Not surprisingly my class’ English test average surprised the other Chinese teachers.
It would not be an overstatement to say that if well planned, PowerPoint presentations can take away 50-70% of the burden of presenting new vocabulary to large classes.

So what about small classes? Needless to say that most often it is easier to teach smaller language classes than large ones. I have only focused on large classes because that is the area where using PowerPoint has solved a great deal of problems for teachers. Well, let me sum it up this way. If PowerPoint presentations are great for large classes, then they make teaching smaller classes seem too easy.